THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 16, 1996 TAG: 9610160402
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY ANNE SAITA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CURRITUCK LENGTH: 113 lines
A homeless man who wooed, and eventually wed, an elderly Moyock woman he met through a personal ad was sentenced Tuesday to 17.1 years in prison for killing her.
Henry Gregory ``Greg'' Lumsden, 47, pleaded guilty on Monday to second-degree murder in Currituck County Superior Court in Currituck. Mary Frances ``Fran'' Lumsden was strangled by her husband on or just before her 72nd birthday during an argument at their Guinea Road home.
Fran Lumsden was found in a nightgown slumped over the bathtub with her underwear around her ankles. Evidence on Tuesday suggested the woman, who had coronary disease, may actually have died of a heart attack brought on by the Sept. 22, 1995, assault.
Lumsden, a husky man with shoulder-length, wavy brown hair and a beard, stood expressionless as Superior Court Judge J. Richard Parker issued the sentence.
Lumsden, originally from Portsmouth, received the maximum 205 months in prison. He was given credit for the year he's already served in jail awaiting trial. With time off for good behavior, he could be released in 12 1/2 years.
Testimony during a hearing this week indicated Lumsden met the former Frances Muse through a personal ad Muse had placed in a shopping guide. At the time, in March 1993, Lumsden was separated from his wife in Hampton Roads and was living in his car. He moved in with Muse on their first date and weeks later asked her to marry him.
The couple lived together for 1 1/2 years before Lumsden's divorce - his second - was final. They married the next day, on Sept. 17, 1994.
Testimony indicated that from the time the two met, Greg Lumsden showed nothing but warmth and kindness toward his eventual bride, who didn't believe in banks and kept a considerable amount of cash in the house. At the time, Frances Lumsden had been receiving regular cash allowances of $2,000 to $4,000 from some of her seven children.
The money was to help with living expenses. The money came from health club and massage parlors that two daughters owned and operated in Pennsylvania.
``Greg had always been very charming and said he loved her and that money didn't matter,'' one of those daughters, Daisy Boch of Chesapeake, testified Tuesday. ``But he always wanted a lot of fancy presents.''
In April 1995, a local ordinance in Pennsylvania forced some of the daughters' clubs to close. Eventually all the centers shut down.
Boch told her mother that she and her sister could no longer afford to send money. That forced the couple to live off of Fran's Social Security check and her husband's $6.68 hourly wage from the City of Chesapeake.
Boch continued to spend a great deal of time caring for her elderly mother, who could no longer drive. Both Boch and another daughter living on the Outer Banks testified that their stepfather ``became a totally different person'' when the money dried up.
Despite the need to cut back expenses, Greg Lumsden continued to buy costly guns and hunting outfits and to plan for a $3,500 hunting trip.
He also grew increasingly mean around Fran Lumsden's children. Lumsden tried to isolate his wife from her children, her daughter Daisy Boch testified. Fran Lumsden confided to her daughters that the marriage was falling apart and she wanted a divorce. Days before her death, she'd told them she feared for her life.
Insurance companies had begun calling or mailing information on policies she knew nothing about. She had also found a personal ad that Lumsden had written for the same publication that had brought the two of them together.
In the ad, Lumsden said he was seeking someone interested in a single white male who owned his own home in North Carolina. Fran Lumsden owned the home at the time.
Fran Lumsden grew increasingly uneasy and nervous, especially around her husband, whom she confronted once in front of Boch.
``She even asked him, `Are you going to kill me?', and he didn't answer,'' Boch testified.
Two days later, Boch got a phone call from Greg Lumsden at 5:30 a.m. He said he'd found Fran leaning over the bathtub and she wasn't breathing.
``He sounded normal - calm, cool and collected. He was actually a lot more friendly during that conversation than he had been all week,'' Boch testified.
Boch and her husband arrived at the house shortly after police and paramedics, around 6 a.m.
``When I saw my mother, I knew that this wasn't right,'' she said. ``Her body was black and blue, and it was stiff and cold. It was the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen.
``There was no way you could look at that body and say she was just passed out,'' as Lumsden had first suggested on the telephone an hour earlier, Boch said.
Det. Mark Gray, who led the investigation for the Currituck County Sheriff's Department, said during a break in the trial that the murder probably occurred between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
Gray immediately suspected foul play and brought in the State Bureau of Investigation to assist. A few days later, Lumsden confessed to strangling his wife, but claimed it was an accident. By then Lumsden had changed all the locks at the Moyock house to keep his stepchildren away. They were also left out of the funeral arrangements.
Lumsden told Boch he planned to pay for the funeral with cash he knew was kept in a secret safe deposit box. His wife had gotten the box to hide cash for her children in the event she was killed, according to Monday's testimony.
Several of Lumsden's friends and coworkers testified Tuesday that the murder was out of character for the normally passive man.
``I've never seen him get mad or lose his temper or cuss. He's always been quiet and easygoing,'' said Janet Allen of Moyock, who worked and socialized with Lumsden.
Allen's daughter, Michelle Allen of Virginia Beach, said: ``I believe him to be a very gentle, honest and caring person who would go out of his way for the people that he loved.''
A psychological report indicated Lumsden tended to be passive and underestimate serious situations, including his marital and financial decline.
``He tended to deceive himself about the severity of his problems while she was living,'' said his attorney, H.P. Williams of Elizabeth City. ``He could not face the fact that she was forcing him out,'' said Williams, who suggested that Lumsden felt provoked by his wife.
Assistant District Attorney Robert Trivette disputed that claim.
``Nothing she did to this man could be considered any provocation to this man,'' he said. ``She did absolutely nothing to deserve this.''
In 1991, Lumsden was convicted of simple assault in a case involving his second wife, who now lives in Virginia Beach and who attended Tuesday's proceedings.
KEYWORDS: TRIAL MURDER SENTENCE by CNB